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1907, silver and gold on canvas, 138 x 138 cm,
owner Ronald S. Lauder, NewGalery, New York, USA
Abstraction and realism synthetically merge in this portrait. If you look long into the picture, you can see exotic symbols - Egyptian eyes in triangles and Mycenaean spirals.
artist: Gustav Klimt (Austria)
(1862- 1918)
image: Public domain
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portrait_of_Adele_Bloch-Bauer_I#/media/File:Gustav_Klimt_046.jpg
Submitted by: art1742
Return to section: 8 female portraits hall (1-150)
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Gustav Klimt - "Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I" (Golden Adele)
"Golden Adele" for many years was the most real national symbol of Austria. By popularity and replicability, she was not inferior to another famous picture of Klimt - "Kiss." Souvenir shops in Vienna were crowded with a wide variety of objects depicting this fatal beauty with a high hairdo and languid eyes, half-covered with heavy eyelids. When Austria had to part with the picture, this event was a tragedy of a national scale. Seeing [Expand]
There is a legend according to which Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer ordered Gustav Klimt a portrait of his wife Adel after learning about their novel. The insulted and humiliated man came up with an ideal plan for revenge for the unfaithful wife and her lover. He promised the artist an astronomical sum for a unique canvas, during which Klimt would have to spend so much time with Adele that soon he would simply disobey him. Bloch-Bauer heard about the numerous mistresses of the artist and about the fact that none of them stayed with Klimt for a long time. As a result, "Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer" was not only a profitable investment, but also an excellent way to take revenge on his wife, who was forced to watch every day, how her lover's passion was quenched.
When in 1938 Germany invaded Austria, almost all the property of the Bloch-Bauer family was captured by the Nazis. During the Second World War, Adele's portrait was concealed from the public because of the sheer Jewish origin of the model, but after the war she took a place in the Belvedere Gallery. The only surviving representative of the Bloch-Bauer family, the niece of Ferdinand and Adele, Maria Altman, who escaped Nazi persecution and became a US citizen, learned in 1998 that she was the owner of the portrait by her uncle's will. Thus began the 8-year-old judicial red tape, which caused the international scandal. But, in the end, Maria Altman managed to regain and the "Golden Adele", and other paintings of Klimt, bequeathed by Ferdinand. In the spring of 2015, the film "Woman in Gold" with Helen Mirren and Ryan Reynolds starring on the struggle of Maria Altman and her lawyer with the Austrian authorities appeared on the screens.
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